The Wild Feathers Return with “Lonely is a Lifetime”

Los Angeles – Nashville rockers The Wild Feathers knew they wanted to do something a little bit different for the follow-up to their 2013 self-titled debut. While their sound has had a bit of a rough around the edges quality, the four friends and bandmates wanted to tap into the raw, live sound they had created after playing hundreds of shows. The Wild Feather’s sophomore album, Lonely is a Lifetime, was released on March 11. It has a larger, more live-feeling sound than its predecessor. However, it still brings enough hooks for The Wild Feathers to match the commercial success of the single “The Ceiling.”

Lonely Is a Lifetime might sound like an album full of heady, depressing subject matter. Drummer Ben Dumas clarifies that while the album touches on loneliness often, it is not all doom and gloom. “One of the big themes on the record is loneliness,” said Dumas. “A lot of the songs, lyrically, were written while we were out touring. There are a lot of songs about missing people, being away, saying goodbye. Living life out on the road is very fun and thrilling, but it can make you feel lonely at times and isolated at times. It’s something we have been through the past couple years collectively. I don’t mean to sound like such a downer, it sounds like a really heavy title, but we’re not sad and mopey. I think the title is somewhat indicative of the lyrical themes on the record.”

“Ricky [Young] and Taylor [Burns] and Joel [King] write the lyrics. They’re the real wordsmiths, but it falls kind of evenly. On the new record, we don’t really force anything. We don’t re-write. A lot of times people will ask us about the writing process; it can happen any way possible. For example, one guy can write the lyrics for an entire song, or it can be split up evenly between three people, or two people, or one guy could write everything and one guy could just add in a line.”

To write the album, The Wild Feathers had to take breaks from their incredibly busy tour schedule. They squeezed in a weekend in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, as well as a 10 day stretch in Barcelona, Spain. The unique histories of each locale did not directly influence the record (there won’t be any flamenco or Delta blues passages on Lonely Is a Lifetime), but their environment had an overall effect on the songwriters.

“Sonically, for example, you wouldn’t hear a Spanish influence or something like that,” said Dumas. “I don’t want to say musically we were influenced by where we were. But for example, being in Barcelona for a while, we were stuck there between shows for about 10 days. Instead of flying home we just stayed in Barcelona and we rented out a practice space there. We were there just kind of, just us guys in the band hanging out in Barcelona. We were just left to our own devices, and we did so much sightseeing. We saw the amazing architecture, like the Gaudí architecture. That influenced us in a way to step out of our own box, basically, and try to do something different, being surrounded by totally different landscapes and different architecture and different culture and different art, different everything. Mentally and emotionally for us it had a huge impact, just being in different places and being by ourselves, removed from everything.”

Meanwhile, Muscle Shoals was a quicker stop for The Wild Feathers, but still crucial in the creation of Lonely Is a Lifetime.

“[Muscle Shoals] was a thing where we had a spare weekend or something. We were touring so much, and we knew we had to start bunkering down and getting some songs written to record. We just found a weekend of time and packed up and went to a cabin in Muscle Shoals for a few days. Again, like I said [we were] just trying to get away from everything. It was a stop in-between cities where we were touring. It wasn’t like we were in Nashville for a long time and we said ‘Oh, let’s just go down for the weekend.’ We thought, ‘Let’s just stop here [between tour dates] and work on some stuff and see what happens.’ And I think being in Muscle Shoals, as a famous music place, there’s a lot of soul there, and I think some of that seeped its way in.”

While the writing process can have an effect on an album’s final sound, the most important way for a band to achieve that live, on-the-stage sound is during the recording phase. Once again, the quartet teamed up with producer Jay Joyce at his studio in their hometown of Nashville, Tennessee.

“What was really fun, was Joy Joyce’s studio is this huge church in East Nashville, and [he] made it into this amazing, beautiful studio,” said Dumas. “And for some of the songs, to really get that live sound, we’d set up our amps and our instruments and everything up on the pulpit of the church, so it was like being on a stage. And we recorded as if we were on a stage, and it’s a huge room. For a lot of the stuff to get that huge sound we just set it up like it was a stage, amps turned up all the way. I like that. It sounds raw, and if you listen to it, you can kind of feel a lot of frequencies going crazy, like a real live band would at a show.”

Now that Lonely Is a Lifetime has been released, it is back to the grind of touring for The Wild Feathers. They will spend the third week of March down in Austin, TX for the music extravaganza that is SXSW. They then head out on a massive tour that will keep them on the road until mid-May. For more info head to the band’s website.

Perhaps it was years of listening to the eclectic and eccentric programming of KPIG-FM with his dad while growing up on the Central Coast of California, but Matt Matasci has always rebuffed mainstream music while seeking unique and under-the-radar artists.Like so many other Californian teenagers in the 90s and 00s, he first started exploring the alternative music world through Fat Wreck Chords skate-punk.This simplistic preference eventually matured into a more diverse range of tastes - from the spastic SST punk of Minutemen to the somber folk-tales of Damien Jurado, and even pulverizing hardcore from bands like Converge.He graduated from California Lutheran University with a BA in journalism.Matt enjoys spending his free time getting angry at the Carolina Panthers, digging through the dollar bin at Amoeba, and taking his baby daughter to see the Allah-Lahs at the Santa Monica Pier.